There are several cartoon characters who are certainly not human. However, they are also clearly not any species of readily identifiable animal either. Some of them appear to be Mix-and-Match Critters. They don't really have a species, they're just... cute.

Not to be confused with Informed Species, where the character is supposed to be a specific animal, but doesn't look like that animal. If the character is clearly meant to be a (normally) inanimate object, then the trope is Animate Inanimate Object.

Examples:

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Advertising

One of the Sci-fi Channel's ads features a woman playing with her pet. Said pet—presumably extraterrestrial—has a vaguely Chihuahua-like overall appearance, large batlike ears, huge expressive eyes, an extremely long striped tufted tail, and a long forked tongue that it uses to daintily touch the tongue of its owner.

Anime and Manga

Cardcaptor Sakura: Kerberos spends much of his time as a winged teddy bear like creature. His true form looks like a mane-less male lion with armor and wings. He's a creation of Clow, so he may be the only one of his species, assuming he's not a lion. It's never made clear what exactly he is supposed to be.

Plue from Rave Master/Groove Adventure Rave. He's something like a snowman crossed with a dog. The theme song identifies him as a "carrot-nosed" dog. By Word of God, Plue was actually an old drawing of the manga's creator from when he was a kid. Rave was made out of desire to draw a shounen manga starring said creature. Even then, the creator can't remember if he intended to draw a dog or what.

In Fairy Tail, from the same writer of Rave Master, Plue is the Canis MinorZodiac summon. What this means is debatable, since nobody but himself and the summon system believes he's a dog, and he doesn't even trigger the caniphobia of Happy. Happy himself falls into this trope, being a blue-furred, tuft-tailed, flat-toothed, oft-bipedal winged cat.

Chiyo's dad in Azumanga Daioh, who looks like an elongated, vaguely anthropomorphic cat, most likely pulled from an in-show plush toy by Sakaki's cuteness-obsessed mind.

Played with in Revolutionary Girl Utena, Chu-Chu the monkey resembles a cartoon mouse but seems otherwise like a regular monkey, so fans assume he's some kind of marmoset/tariser/lemur thing, despite not looking quite like that either. Utena rightly points out Chu-Chu as a name makes him sound too much like a mouse, due to that being the Japanese onomatopoeia for a mouse's squeaks.

Many Digimon are clearly examples of this trope in action. There's some who look like animals or plants, there's some who look like humans◊, some who look like objects or machines and we have stuff like these.◊

Kyubey from Puella Magi Madoka Magica has a tail like a ferret or fox, but a head more like that of a cat, only with an extra pair of ears. According to Word of God, he was designed without any real animal in mind. He's actually an alien, so it's probably a moot point anyway.

Q-chan from Pet Shop of Horrors is some sort of rabbit-devil creature with a cream-coloured pear-shaped body and rabbit ears, little white horns, black bat wings, a black devil tail, and black duck feet. No-one ever really asks what he is. Q-chan may be loosely based on the wolpertinger, a Bavarian hybrid creature. Essentially, it looks like a bunny, but has wings and antlers.

Ryo-Ohki from Tenchi Muyo!, when it's not a spaceship, looks like what some fans refer to as a "cabbit"; pretty much a lop-eared bunny with a cat's face. It's actually a crystal-blob creature/spaceship that assimilated a (dying)kitten. Later, she assimilates another crystal-blob creature with a humanoid form and gained the ability to turn into a Funny Animal version of herself in a child or adult form.

Fuku in Tenchi Muyo! GXP is essentially another model of Ryo-Oh-Ki with a built-in potential to take a humanoid form.

Max of Sam & Max: Freelance Police is rabbit-like in shape, but with sharp, carnivorous-looking teeth and a highly aggressive attitude. He's referred to as a "rabbity-thing" by other characters, but prefers the term "lagomorph" himself (which is Greek for "rabbit-shaped"). Strong Bad refers to Sam and Max as "Rabbit-dog and Bunnyman".

Sonic the Comic often had some sort of generic pseudo-Dogface animal that looked strange compared to other characters, that would appear to populate city areas. Grimer is..Something. He looks like a Goblin, or at least something non-animal; how he came to be on Mobius is never explained. Well, Grimer started out as an expy of Grima Wormtongue from "Lord of the Rings", so...magically corrupted human?

Cheburashka from Russian cartoons, pictured above. He appears to be part teddy bear, part koala, and part monkey. Cheburashka is the name of his species they agreed on. Originally his name was translated into English as "Topple". Cheburashka, according to the book, is "a funny little creature, unknown to science, who lives in the tropical forest". Some people say that he is reminiscent of lorids.

His true origin is that he's a flawed toy, hence the unconventional appearance.

Hugo from the Danish film series Jungledyret Hugo. He is often described by fans to be a bear/koala-like thing like Cheburashka.

Film

The big-eared, fuzzy Mogwai from the Gremlins movies most closely resemble a small prosimian primate, like a bushbaby or tarsier, minus the tail (and stubby limbs). In the second film, Gizmo is tentatively identified as some sort of rodent by a pair of scientists.

In Jim Henson's early 1950s shows, all the puppets were fairly abstract. Even Kermit (one of his earliest characters) was only declared to be a frog in the mid-60s, and only consistently one following his role as Narrator of The Frog Prince in 1971.

The god Set in Egyptian Mythology has the head of an unknown and mysterious creature that resembles a composite of an aardvark, a donkey, and a jackal. Modern Egyptologists usually refer to it as the "Set animal", "Typhonic beast", or "she". A few theorize that the head isn't an aardvark, but rather some species of gar or other pointy-faced carnivorous fish; whatever they are, they were the ones that ate Osiris' willie when Set cut him up and threw him in the Nile. It can't just be a fish, though, since statues show it as some sort of emaciated hyena-looking thing. However, according to one account he is apparently supposed to have head of a hippo and others say he has the head of a giraffe, though the latter was ruled out on the grounds that the Egyptians made the distinction between a giraffe and a donkey.

The behemoth in The Bible: Job 40:15-24 describes some large animal said to eat grass an live near a river. Most scholars believe said behemoth was either a hippopotamus or a water buffalo. Although the bit about having a tail like a cedar tree leads many to believe it's a sauropod dinosaur of some kind.

Newspaper Comics

Eugene the Jeep from Popeye comics looks like a dog sized, yellow, spotted, ambiguous looking cat-thing with a big, lightbulb-looking nose. Meanwhile, the animated cartoons define him as some sort of dog.

Pinball

Time Fantasy is infamous for its psychedelic theme, centered around a green and yellow creature with spindly limbs, bulbous eyes, and a large snail-like shell on its head and back.

Video Games

There are a few of these in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. Most of the characters are recognizably some kind of established Mushroom Kingdom creature, but some, such as the Glitz Pit security guards, just look like bizarre anthropomorphic things.

The Chao in Sonic the Hedgehog. Small blue creatures with teardrop shaped heads, a connection to an ancient deity, and the ability to evolve based on what animals are around them.

A good number of recurring enemies count as well. Waddle Dees are shaped like Kirby, but lack a mouth and have faces resembling monkeys. Scarfies are flying orange blobs with ears and smiley faces that turn into cyclopses if you anger them. Waddle Doos are Waddle Dees, but with a giant eyeball where their face should be. And that's just a few of them!

Gen An from Samurai Shodown. He specifically denies being a goblin. Some Western fans refer to him as a tengu, but he doesn't look like one.

Several of the potential students in Magician's Quest: Mysterious Times/Enchanted Folk and the School of Wizardry don't have any readily identifiable species. While many of them are based on animals (or plants, or inanimate objects), some of them are just... things. Good examples include the "cupcake girls" (human-ish yet not all that human girls with cupcakes/ice cream/something on their heads), Matthew the cat/dog/bear critter, and Matt the... the... err, alien? It's not very clear.

Nevertheless, it has the king of this trope, Eevee. Thanks to an Unstable Genetic Code, it has at least eight evolutions, and all of them are as indeterminate as it is. Word of God says the original Eevee is inspired by a fox; probably a Fennec — compare: Fennec pups and Pikachu◊. Even then, many people still see Eevee as more cat-, squirrel-, or rabbit-like than fox-like.

Lugia, a gigantic dragon-bird-monster-thing, has been stated to be this via Word of God. It's been speculated by some that it might be based on an albatross, but the resemblance isn't really there.

A lot of Fighting- and Psychic-type Pokemon don't have any particular basis beyond "humanoid". The Abra and Tyrogue families stand out.

Some people say Klonoa is a cat. Others say he's a rabbit. Some people even call him a "cabbit". The only thing anyone can agree on is that he's adorable.

He's not the only member of his species, though. There's also Grandpa, Balue, the King of Sorrow...

Klonoa: Empire of Dreams gives us Emperor Jillius, who looks like some kind of fox or koala, and Bagoonote Not to be confused with Balue above, who appears to be some kind of reptile.

The Unndergrounders in Mr. Driller are some kind of round, blue creatures with small arms and feet, and huge eyes; there's no way to tell what the hell are those things.

The hero of the Sega Saturn game Bug. Besides being a Four-Legged Insect, he doesn't seem to be based off any real-life bug- he's a green bug with the head of a praying mantis, the body of a grasshopper, and the stinger of a bee.

What are the "ghosts" in Pac-Man? Are they living creatures made of flesh or ghosts? In the original game, one of the between-round cutscenes has a "ghost" catch and tear off one of the rounded bits at the bottom on a sharp point, implying it's a costume. "Ghosts" came into usage when the Atari 2600 Porting Disaster had them flicker (because there wasn't enough memory for more than one on the screen at a time), and later versions just blurred the line further.

Many Monster Rancher characters fit the bill. Many are based off plants, inanimate objects, mythological creatures, and animals (albeit rather loosely with most examples).

Nobody can figure out what kind of animal Ardy Lightfoot is supposed to be, although "fox cat" is the best guess.

The player characters and the babies in Offspring Fling! are only ever called 'forest creatures'.

Yacopu from the Sunsoft game Trip World looks sort of like a rabbit, aside from being bipedal. His species is "Shabubu," whatever that is.

Mr. Game & Watch definitely qualifies based on his portrayal in the Super Smash Bros. games, seeing that he is an anthropomorphic... something. And two-dimensional.

In Super Mario Bros., Yoshi is usually described as some kind of dinosaur, but other than sharing a basic body shape with dinos like raptors, Tyrannosaurus rex, and other carnosaurs; there's not much resemblance. They're also referred to as dragons sometimes but don't resemble any typical designs.

The title character of Zool has vaguely insectlike facial features, which led to the widespread misconception that he was supposed to be an ant. "Gremlin" is his official species, which is more a publisher's self-reference than anything else.

A few yokai from Yo-kai Watch are this. Komasan and his brother Komajiro are officially komainu lion-dogs, but look like a mix of a cat and a panda, and Komajiro gets referred to as tiger-like in the English version of the video game.

Fidget is the only non-humanoid (well, less humanoid at least; she's about the size of a real fruit bat, doesn't wear clothes, and has paws instead of hands) animal in Dust: An Elysian Tail. Dust has no idea what she even is until an NPC identifies her as a "nimbat".

A Hat in Time: The Conductor doesn't really look like any creature out there, with a face that looks like a cartoonish, eyeless dog-dragon-axolotl thingy with a really big mouth full of sharp teeth. Made rather funny by the fact the chapter he's in, which features Dueling Movies between his own and DJ Grooves (a clear penguin), is called Battle of the Birds, while the Conductor himself clearly doesn't look like any avian except maybe a sharp-toothed Woodstock. Generally, the fans agree that his species is "Bird(?)".

Species X from DNA. They look like humans except for being covered in grey hair, having very large ears which may be round or triangular, sharp teeth, and black noses, and sometimes a short fluffy tail. The author has not yet revealed what animal or animals they are based on although she has confirmed several things that they are not, although because Species X was genetically engineered, they likely have DNA from multiple animals.

Sparklecare: Most characters are anthro animals, but with a few weird characteristics. Dr. Doom, on the other hand, is all over the place. He's a furry white creature with enormous round ears, four arms and four legs, and more.

According to Amoridere, Toki's species started out this way, as she couldn't decide what to call it, until, when she was typing in "Eirin", she had misspelled it as "Erin" so she settled on that, pronouncing it "Ee-RIHN".

In Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, Sketchbook is a notepad, Duck Guy's a bird, Yellow Guy's a human, and Tony is a clock, but... what is Red Guy supposed to be again? A squid? Spaghetti man? Cthulhumanoid? Just a red human with a stringy beard? It's hard to tell. Becky indicated that Red Guy is a personification of spaghetti on her Instagram.

Bosko and Honey from Tiny Toon Adventures, who were antecedents to the Warners of Animaniacs. He's a living blot of ink as shown in his premier "Bosko, the Talk-Ink Kid", and was vague enough that the creators were asked, at least once, what he was supposed to be. They look like either dogs, cats, or rabbits. The Tiny Toon Adventures redesign came about because the original design of Bosko and Honey owed a great deal to blackface caricature — when the characters' creators transferred to MGM, they were redesigned◊ to look unmistakably like caricatured black children. Redesigning the characters to resemble the Warners was a less problematic option.

Originally (before he was pitted against Mickey Mouse in 1928), Pete was depicted as a nondescript American black bear. In the early days when he was pitted against Mickey, he was a black cat with a white face, a modest looking chin, and a tail. Now he is depicted as an ambiguous looking cat without a tail, a flesh colored muzzle, and a really big chin.

The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse version of Pete looks reasonably like the cat, but the Kingdom Hearts "present day" version of Pete, though still a cat, looks more like a French Bulldog.

The main character in Chowder is, according to Word of God, part cat, part rabbit, and part bear. Most of the other characters count too. Panini looks like a rabbit with some cat bits. They are apparently the same species. The show lampshades this trope from time to time, such as Chowder making a scene as a distraction, demanding that people "label him" as the appropriate animal.

Everyone except Wubbzy himself and Widget in Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!, but it's easy to guess which species each one is based upon.

Many of the characters from Sonic Underground don't have an established species. Sonic's still vaguely hedgehog-y and therefore so are his immediate family, Robotnik's still vaguely human-y... but what any of the sibling's foster-parents are meant to be is an open question.note Okay, Sonic's uncle Chuck is a hedgehog, but it still goes for the other two. Especially Manic's foster dad Farrell.

Humf, the titular character from the cartoon series of the same name. Looks like a purple carnivorous lamb, but really, what exactly is he? The creators call him a furry purple thing, which is what he's referred as being in the show. One of his friends, Wallace, is equally ambiguous in design (resembling a Waddling Head). At least his other friend, Loon, looks like a pink peacock.

Rare non-animal example: Percy of Thomas the Tank Engine. While most other characters are based on real locomotive classes, Percy is a heavily hybridized mix of several other steam engine designs.

Another non-animal example would be Cars' Lightning McQueen. According to his toy bio, he is actually "a 2006 all-new, one-of-a-kind race car."

He has some caterpillar DNA though (one episode had him going into a cocoon and coming out with butterfly wings.

The people of Miseryville in Jimmy Two-Shoes. They have everystrangebody trope you can imagine, and they're all different. Considering the setting, it's likely that they're supposed to be demons, in keeping with the portrayal of angels as totally unrecognizable in The Bible.

The characters in Out There are pretty inhuman what with their clawed handstubs, round black noses and oddly coloured skin/fur but it's unclear what they are exactly as they never actually address this and refer to themselves as human. Even Chad's family are a different indeterminate species to the rest of the cast and resemble rodents of some kind but again, this isn't questioned and is more a source of Furry Confusion for the audience than anything.

Keswick from T.U.F.F. Puppy is of a species that even the other members of T.U.F.F. can't name, though it's sometimes mentioned that Keswick is also the name of his species. Worth mentioning is his bizarre life cycle: his adult stage is a marsupial-like form with webbed feet, his adolescent stage is the same except with a reptilian tail that breaks off to become another Keswick that will fight the other to the death, his child stage is a platypus that shoots barbs out of its mouth, his neonatal stage is a tadpole, and his senior stage is a jellyfish.

Alfe from The Problem Solverz. He's supposed to be part man, part dog, and part anteater, but he's basically a giant brown thing with a long nose.

Denver the Last Dinosaur is fairly ambiguous; he does have some dinosaur in him and of course some typical Funny Animal elements as you might expect but a whole bunch of dragon-like elements to his design make him a very odd looking dino (at least to our knowledge).

The titular Wander of Wander over Yonder, who looks sort of like a fuzzy brown sock with eyes, a mouth, and limbs. The producer's call him an "orange hairy spoon". Technically, however, he and all the other members of the cast are aliens.

Mr Sunshine from CatDog. He's a green, humanoid looking man with a tail in a world where Funny Animals and Civilized Animals are the norm. Fans often believe him to be a shell-less turtle, sloth, or monkey.

While most of the characters on the show Toot & Puddle avoid this, Commander Betty from the story "Astronaut Camp" falls into this trope. On one hand, she's most likely an alligator given the association with Florida where the episode takes place. On the other hand, her design doesn't look much like an alligator and some fans even think she resembles a strangely colored pike with arms and legs instead.

The three main characters of The Presentators are this. They resemble somewhat indistinct shapes with stick-thin arms and necks, along with hands of varying sizes. Notably, Stefan's face is shaped differently from his two co-presenters, having a noticeable (and asymmetrical) chin, while Dan and Brian have vaguely square-shaped heads and mouths right at the bottom. Since they're standing behind a table the entire time, we never get to see their lower bodies.

Fritz from Timothy Goes to School appears to be some sort of badger-skunk hybrid. Official sources (books, episode descriptions) have described as one or the other; not helping is the student teacher, Ms. Appleberry, appearing to be the exact same species.

The main character in Moom, the second animated short by Tonko House, pretty much resembles a Cheburashka but much cuter.

Sunspot from Ready Jet Go!, as well as the other Bortronian pets such as Moonbeam. They look like dog-cat-bunny-kangaroo-raccoon hybrids. Uncle Zucchini even lampshades this in "A Visit from Uncle Zucchini".

The Amazing World of Gumball: Naturally, with the tendency towards Medium Blending and generally enormous amounts of characters, there'd be plenty of these. Principal Brown's case is special in that even he doesn't know what he is, and so far has only learned that whatever he is doesn't hibernate in winter (he tried).

Other

Wilber◊ is the mascot of the GIMP, an open source image editor. No one is sure exactly what he is.

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